Productions featuring famous bands or other music stars, as well as musicals, plays, and other forms of entertainment are often touring productions. These productions typically appear at a particular venue in a particular city for a limited time, often just a single show on a single night. Despite the limited nature of the engagements, the staging of such productions is usually complex and highly customized. As a result, shows generally travel with their own caravan of stage equipment that is assembled and disassembled at each stop along the tour.
Assembling and disassembling the stage and its associated equipment is time-consuming and generally entails many persons, often referred to as road-hands or “roadies,” working many long hours. Furthermore, the tour schedule usually leaves little time to spare between performances making stage assembly/disassembly a race against the clock. Touring productions are usually very expensive to produce and additional costs can have an adverse effect on a production's overall profitability.
Often, the portable nature of the equipment for stage productions limits the flexibility of the performance of the equipment due to the way and the location where the components attach. For example, lighting may be attached to pre-existing structures in a particular venue. Generally, these structures lack the ability to move or provide motion to the equipment, making readjustments to any of the equipment difficult, especially during the performance. In addition, such support systems have limited flexibility in providing lighting or sound to specific locations or at specific angles and are subject to the limitations of the configuration of the particular venues.
While movable lighting, such as robotic lighting, provides some motion and flexibility, the motions are still limited by the location in which the light is mounted. In addition, the robotic lighting still requires individual installation of each light and has a limited range of motion and/or area of illumination.
What is needed is a portable structure for staged productions that provides flexible positioning of mounted equipment that is easily stored and transported and does not suffer from one or more of the drawbacks present in current staging equipment.